>"Valuable contribution according to coldtea" is not a thing. And without irony, I'll add thankfully.

Here's where you're wrong though. "Valuable contribution according to coldtea" is a thing -- it describes my personal estimation of the worth of things. In fact not only it's a thing, but everybody has the same thing (their own value estimations of things), I'll add thankfully.

And few would let money dictate their personal estimation of the worth of things especially (as we discuss here) concerning meaning (Ebenezer Skroutz comes to mind). It would influence their actions, sure, but not their idea of meaning and value in toto.

It's "valuable contribution according to money" that's not a thing. Money just measure how much profit one can extract, not the value of how they extracted it. Crime, for one, generates tons of money as well. Few would agree it contributes lots of value, unless (as some do) we twist the meaning of value to be a tautology for demand.

But while individuals sometimes do that thing (which you also seem to propose), that is constrained their definition of value to monetary profit, no society has ever done that. Value and meaning, for societies and for most individuals, are ethical considerations that go beyond "makes us money".

>What is a good vs bad contribution to society is played out over periods of time and using millions of independents actors (aka society). No single individual or small "central committee" can impose that judgement, simply because they do not know the final end result down the road. It's toothless virtue-signalling.

Which is neither here not there. I didn't propose that "a single individual or small "central committee"" imposes their judgement.

Just that money influx (or lack thereof) can't substitute for that judgement.

To use your words, "What is a good vs bad contribution to society is played out over periods of time and using millions of independents actors (aka society)", and this involves moral considerations, collaboration, and personal judgement of those actors, not just their monetary exchanges -- that would be a caricature of reductionistic 18th century economics, where money defines all that's good.

That I can agree with.

It is your earlier posts where you say "Money … should … not even try to touch meaning" and "The question is not if these jobs make money … but if they contribute anything to the society" that raise the red flag.

While money and social contribution are not equivalent (which nobody claimed), they are massively interlinked and correlated—by design, by necessity.

Good individual intentions can lead to social hell, bad intentions can lead to social progress; good intentions can help, bad intentions can hurt. We're notoriously bad at predicting social outcomes from our individual preferences. It's often downright counter-intuitive, as the two breathe at completely different scales.

I'd take "social value according to money" over "social value according to coldtea" any time, when evaluating long-term societal contributions. Not ideal but it's a distributed process honed over millenia, with many costly experiments and some non-obvious failures and successes. We don't have to follow that blindly of course, but we better learn from it. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water by introducing such false dichotomies.

>While money and social contribution are not equivalent (which nobody claimed), they are massively interlinked and correlated—by design, by necessity.

Are they though? Adam Smith (and others) have argued that, but I think that the correlation is at best accidental. The mechanism that connects money with society is demand (money goes to those providing something people want).

But society can demand all kinds of things that weaken or destroy it as well. Many had in the past, and many have today.

It's not even about individual judgement vs society: in many cases the whole of society can agree that X is harmful, but tons of people will still demand it (and thus reward it with money) nonetheless (including the same persons that condemn it).

It gets worse when a full scale, highly elaborate, mechanism of advertising, consumer manipulation, misinformation, etc is at play to make people want this or that.

And we haven't even added monopolies, favoritism, etc to the list that much further skew money awarded as a measure of societal demand (as this demand can be artificially propped up)-- and even worse for societal value.

So, my argument is that at best money counts demand (not the same thing as value), and that even that can be skewed.

>I'd take "social value according to money" over "social value according to coldtea" any time, when evaluating long-term societal contributions.

>Not ideal but it's a distributed process honed over millenia, with many costly experiments and some non-obvious failures and successes.

I'm not sure it's that honed. For millennia economy took the backseat to other considerations (civic, religious, philosophical, moral, cultural, etc). To the point that individuals and societies would not follow certain money making paths against those considerations.

It's only in the latest couple of centuries that economy took the seat front and center - and not necessarily for the better (and we have a long way to learn about the cost of the externalities we amassed while doing so, which might even leave the planet uninhabitable).

Winning (and not even that easily -- it took almost 80 years) over a few communist countries with inflexible dictatorships starting from ex-rural / third-world conditions, is a pretty low bar to determine the effectiveness of the market/money as the measure of societal value.

You shouldn't be getting down voted. People instinctively are interpreting what you're saying as greed.

Money is a good decentralized way to determine where people's preferences truly lie. If you poll everyone we'd all agree teachers should get paid more. But the fact that they don't get paid more means we collectively don't really think they should. Asking people to stake money for their beliefs is a good way to eliminate posturing. No one is truly over or under paid on average

Can you provide any argument for why given two possible measures for real value, money is the one that is correct? Seems like an unsubstantiated assertion to me the way you phrase it.